Last week, Jill Abramson became the first female ever to hold the top editor's job at the New York Times. She'll now be responsible for leading America's most important journalistic institution through a perilous and unsure time of media industry upheaval. So we must ask: what up with her accent?

While other "media news" sites were stumbling over themselves last week to address the economic, sociological, and political implications of Abramson's appointment, one former NYT-er turned to us with this observation on the new boss: "She's a weird MF who sounds for all the world as if she's from the Deep South (just listen to her PBS interview) but is in fact, so she says, from NYC. Have you ever heard ANYONE from NYC pronounce words the way she does, one fucking syllable at a time, with strange stresses on one syllable or another? Not me, that's for sure."

Media insiders are, by definition, talking! A clip of that PBS interview is above. I'm from the South, and Abramson doesn't sound Southern to me; but there's no denying that she does have a certain... inflection that is not the classic tone of a native New Yorker. We went straight to the source and asked Abramson herself. She replied, "my mother and my sister have the same exact accent. We were all born in NYC and grew up on the Upper West Side. (My mother is no longer alive.)"

So there you have it, gossiping Times-watchers. I'd say that you're all very petty people, if that didn't go without saying. The real question now becomes, with all of this investigative reporting, is Gawker ready to "overtake" the NYT, as a journalistic institution? Journalistic observers believe so.